Hannah Sarvasy reported back in 2020 on some suggestive research:

Languages like Japanese, Korean, Turkish and the indigenous languages of the Amazon, East Africa, and New Guinea build sentences in a way that lets them grow to enormous length. Our research shows learning one of these languages may help children create complex sentences that express multiple ideas at a younger age.

Try recounting what you did this morning, or telling a story, and chances are you’ll use a series of several sentences: “This morning, I woke early. I dressed and ate breakfast. I gathered my things, said goodbye to my family, and they waved goodbye to me. Then I drove to work.” In English, the simplest sentence, or “clause,” is just a subject plus a verb (“I dressed”). You can also join two clauses into a sentence using words like “and” or “while,” but it’s unnatural to join more than about three clauses into one English sentence.

But in many languages across Central Asia (from Turkish to Tibetan, Mongolian, Japanese, and Korean), and in many indigenous languages of the Amazon, East Africa, and New Guinea, stories can take the form of one long sentence. These sentences look more like this: “Waking up early this morning, dressing, making breakfast, eating, washing the dishes, gathering my things, saying goodbye to my family, they waving goodbye to me, I drove to work.”

These long sentences are known as “clause chains.” Unlike in English, where most of the clauses in a story would make sense if you spoke them outside the story (“I dressed”), all but the very last clause in a “clause chain” are abbreviated—they can only function in a clause chain. “Dressing” or “making breakfast” sounds unfinished on its own, and only the final verb of the clause chain tells you whether the events are happening in the past, present, or future.

Clause chains are special because they can be extremely long, pushing the boundaries of what we consider “sentences” in English. Chains of more than 100 clauses have been recorded. Non-native speakers may have trouble keeping track of who is doing what in clause chains. One linguist who studied a language of the Himalayas (where many languages use this type of sentence) color-coded clause chains in her notes to keep track of the plot.

In some languages, especially of the Amazon and New Guinea, there’s a further twist. In each clause of the chain, the speaker has to announce in advance whether a different person is carrying out the action in the upcoming clause (as in “saying goodbye to my family, they saying goodbye to me”). This is called “switch-reference marking,” and it probably means speakers of these languages have to plan further ahead than speakers of English.

So do kids learning Turkish or Japanese speak in precociously complex sentences, compared with their Anglophone peers? We investigated this for six languages—Japanese, Korean, and Turkish, plus three indigenous languages of New Guinea and Australia (Ku Waru, Nungon, and Pitjantjatjara). We used a variety of methods, looking at data from different children and from the same children over time. […] It turns out children learning these languages are first able to speak in well-formed clause chains between the ages of two and two and a half. This is around the time that children learning English and French make their first attempts at combining clauses into sentences.

But the English- and French-speaking children generally make some mistakes (for instance, by leaving out conjunctions), or actually express only a single idea across two clauses (in “look at the house that we built!”, there is only one notion: that we built a house). The children learning the clause-chain languages did not make such errors. What’s more, in most of these languages the children’s early clause chains express multiple ideas. It may be that the abbreviated verbs used in all but the last clause of a clause chain make it easy for these children to describe complex sequences of events in a single utterance. […]

It’s well known that children learning most languages go through an early phase in which their utterances are limited to two words: the “two-word phase.” After this, children don’t proceed to a “three-word phase.” Instead, the progression is from two to “more.” However, until now no-one has thought to ask when children learn to combine more than two clauses into a sentence. This may well be because research on how children learn to combine ideas into sentences has been largely shaped by speakers of English and other languages that lack clause chains. (This shows it’s important for scientists to come from varied backgrounds!)

When we investigated this idea, we found that all children learning languages with clause chains begin by speaking in two-clause chains. So no, kids don’t begin spouting sentences of 20 clauses at age two! But the “two-clause phase” lasts for as little as one or two months, and after that most children we studied advanced directly to a “more clauses phase,” in which their sentences include anywhere from two to five or more clauses. A Japanese child recorded a 20-clause chain at age three and ten months, and this may not be unusual.

Interesting stuff — thanks, Bathrobe!

I fully support Rachel Cohen’s ideas here about turning our many abandoned malls into housing.

Amy Casciani, a longtime real estate developer whose corporation built housing across seven states, watched her local community struggle for years to add new homes.

Casciani grew up in upstate New York, in a suburban town outside Rochester. She eventually started a family and raised her children there, and in the early 1990s, a new mall opened up, bringing over 100 new stores including anchor retailers like Sibley’s, J.C. Penney, and Sears.

The mall was a proud boon to the town of Irondequoit, and a go-to spot for teenagers to hang out. “Hands down the most attractive shopping mall in the area,” an editorial for a newspaper serving Albany declared. “From its blue Legolike entrances and splashing fountain to its light-trimmed glass roof, columns and carousel, the mall exudes carnival gaiety.”

But in a few short years, retail patterns across the United States began to change. Mall foot traffic slowed and online shopping ticked up. Stores in the Irondequoit Mall began to close, and by 2016, the last major anchor, Sears, called it quits.

Casciani ached for her town, which not only was dealing with the eyesore of the abandoned mall but also lacked enough vacant land to develop desperately needed affordable housing. Her nonprofit development group, PathStone, embarked on a complex but meaningful project: They retrofitted the Sears department store into 73 rental apartments and built a new four-story multifamily building with 84 rental units on the adjacent parking lot.

PathStone connected the two buildings by a raised pedestrian walkway, and the Skyview Park Apartments now serves adults 55 and up who need subsidized housing. Half of the units are reserved for seniors at risk of homelessness, who can receive on-site supportive services.

“As affordable housing needs and costs keep going up and a shortage of available vacant land is growing, why not use what we already have?” Casciani said. “Why not creatively turn it around from being a blight on the community to an asset?”

Across the country, policymakers, researchers, and real estate developers are paying more attention to mall conversions like the one in Irondequoit as they grapple with their own shortage of affordable housing. While the Irondequoit Mall was a traditional mall, strip malls in particular offer some unique advantages, like big empty parking lots, that could make housing redevelopment an easier task.

A report last fall from Enterprise Community Partners, a national nonprofit focused on increasing housing supply, estimated that strip mall conversions could create more than 700,000 new homes across the United States.

There’s so much broken in our discussions about the housing issue, mostly which has to do with everyone having a single talking point that is far too simplistic. One thing that connects a lot of these issues is issue of space. When a person buys up 5 old New York apartments and turns them into his personal fiefdom, that’s a lot of housing that is taken off the market. When everyone wants 2,000 square feet of housing, that really limits what we can do. But also, we have often struggled to retrofit previous disastrous uses of space (and the endless decaying malls, both traditional and strip), is a great example of this.

Here in Rhode Island, where what was once a state of density, the postwar housing boom turned huge parts of what is today Warwick and Cranston into completely unplanned strip malls that are today are decrepit, empty, or just look like shit because they are 50 years old, were poorly planned in the first place, and are half or less full. And yet, for all of our very real housing problems, none of this so far as I can tell has been converted into housing. It’s right there!

The post Let’s Turn Abandoned Malls into Housing! appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.

One of the weird things about bodies is that so very many people seem to have them, and yet not all of them are the same! This is something relatively recently discovered by such luminaries as NASA rocket scientists:

525,600 tampons. How do you measure a trip into space?

The details and implications of this knowledge are still being debated. But one interesting thing that happened along the way is that, according to The Atlantic, doctors started to realize that the questions that they asked FtM folk when they began therapy that artificially changed their hormone levels were not at all the same questions that they asked cis women going through spontaneous hormone changes at menopause.

Marci Bowers thought she understood menopause. Whenever she saw a patient in her 40s or 50s, she knew to ask about things such as hot flashes, vaginal dryness, mood swings, and memory problems. And no matter what a patient’s concern was, Bowers almost always ended up prescribing the same thing. “Our answer was always estrogen,” she told me.

Then in the mid-2000s, Bowers took over a gender-affirmation surgical practice in Colorado. In her new role, she began consultations by asking each patient what they wanted from their body—a question she’d never been trained to ask menopausal women. Over time, she grew comfortable bringing up tricky topics such as pleasure, desire, and sexuality, and prescribing testosterone as well as estrogen. That’s when she realized: Women in menopause were getting short shrift.

Menopause, for the uninitiated, is not merely relief from monthly bleeding. It’s a whole damn thing affecting more organs than you knew you had. And the transition from a stable adult menstrual cycle to a stable post-menopausal body state can be long and chaotic and affect far more than anyone has bothered to research. Kind of like menstruation itself! And while it’s caused to some significant degree by changes in estrogen, neither is that the only cause nor is replacing estrogen the only cure.

Bodies are highly individual things, almost like each person has their own version and it’s not the same as any other. Mind you, this has caused some distress for the medical profession, which has a history of very much wanting to square humans’ pegs and holes, regardless of the harm this might do. Recently, it seems, doctors have even become aware that hacking at the bodies of others in order to maintain binary illusions of an oppressive society may, in fact, be somewhat less than the ethical best practice.

As a result of all this exposure to radical trans antifa, BLM-HRT, police-defunding, highway- and puberty-blocking activists, a few doctors have been questioning a binary or two their own selves.

Although clinicians lack high-quality research on the role of testosterone in women over age 65, they know that in premenopausal women, it plays a role in bone density, heart health, metabolism, cognition, and the function of the ovaries and bladder. A 2022 review concluded, “Testosterone is a vital hormone in women in maintaining sexual health and function” after menopause.

Yet for decades, standard menopause care mostly would mostly pass over androgens. Interest in testosterone therapy has only begun rising—and rapidly—within the last 10 to 15 years. (Nota bene: the lack of research on testosterone use by perimenopausal women was not cited by the NHS as a reason to shut down such “experimental” prescriptions. This is our shocked face.)

There are more barriers than lack of research, however. It turns out that getting cis women comfortable with taking testosterone is not always easy even when it would be medically helpful, for they sometimes think the doctors are calling them trans for the temerity of ceasing menstruation:

[Cis women] have to get used to the idea of taking a hormone they’ve been told all their lives is for men, at just the time when their femininity can feel most tenuous […but…] taking testosterone wouldn’t change a menopause patient’s gender identity.

And patients are not the only ones struggling with holistic care for bodies that produce lots of hormones to varying degrees. Pharmacists, too, have a hard time believing leavening estrogen therapies with a bit of testosterone is kosher:

Some of [Dr. Kelly] Casperson’s female patients have had their testosterone prescription withheld by pharmacists; one was asked if she was undergoing gender transition.

While rapid-onset vaginal dryness has been observed as a side effect of even small doses of Ben Shapiro, the Cooties Hypothesis asserting social transmission of perimenopausal sexual symptoms seems unlikely to go viral, and there is as yet no movement to withhold testosterone from 52-year-old cis women for Baby Jesus and Western Civilization.

What does this all mean?

It means that trans people fighting for the medical establishment to take their care seriously has knock-up effects for cis health, and thus the more doctors get comfortable with trans lives, the better cis women’s care. Queer cis women, too, have benefited straight cis women’s care by challenging assumptions that what women want is too obvious to bother actually asking women. After centuries ignoring women’s desire, The Atlantic reports doctors are beginning conversations with

“Tell me about your sexuality. Tell me, are you happy with that? How long does it take you to orgasm? Do you masturbate? What do you use?”

And the benefits go both ways: trans men who experience menopause as a result of hormone therapy can now benefit from topical vaginal estrogen cremes originally developed to relieve dryness and vaginal pain during straight, menopausal women’s penetrative sex. (Though given the historical lack of conversation about cis women’s desire, it’s likely that these cremes were developed more with an eye towards the benefits to cis het men who didn’t like being turned down.)

This isn’t the only benefit either. Doctors have recently been studying menstruation and fertility in FtM folks taking testosterone, and to the surprise of many a third still ovulated. This should not have been news as testosterone isn’t birth control. Indeed it was tried decades ago to poor effect. And yet this was news in trans communities.

Why don’t we already know these things, study these things, talk about these things?

Part of the problem is that society insists on treating different communities as entirely separate, even when that’s radically inappropriate. And society does this in ways more hypocritic than hippocratic. For decades drug manufacturers would only include cis men in clinical trials of medicines because female bodies were considered a confound and male-bodied trans people were considered to have a confounding illness, even though there was no reason to think that a medicine would know your gender identity and function differently because of that. Yet after trials, manufacturers wanted their drugs prescribed to everyone as if they had been found safe and effective for every body. Even today the safety of many drugs for fetuses or pregnancies or female fertility has gone unstudied, yet the drugs are still prescribed for people who are or may become pregnant, with barely (and not always) an “ask your doctor if” warning.

But they’ve taken the opposite approach when the benefits might flow to patients instead of investors: anti-trans fuckfaces continually insist that puberty blockers have not been proven safe for trans children going through puberty. Yet these are old and well-tested drugs. And yet, the Cass Review is right there, insisting that bone density development during the years of postponed puberty must be studied before puberty blockers can be considered safe for adolescents diagnosed with gender dysphoria. Scotland has even decided to ban the use of puberty blockers until the age of 18, which Yr Wonkette thinks we can all agree misses the point of “puberty blocker” by rather a large margin.

We have said before that trans rights are reproductive rights, and that we are all in this together, and we are not the only ones to notice. Sad Brown Girl writes, “Despite the ongoing rhetorical battles over how trans people should be included in discussions of abortion, the link is unambiguous for those seeking the end of both: as goes abortion, so too transition, and vice versa.”

The Pope agrees, throwing in surrogacy for good measure.

The Vatican on Monday declared gender-affirming surgery and surrogacy as grave violations of human dignity, putting them on par with abortion and euthanasia as practices that it said reject God’s plan for human life. […]

[Pope Francis] has also denounced “gender theory” as the “worst danger” facing humanity today.

Yr Wonkette does not pretend to know whether asking someone what name they prefer is worse than climate change burning Canada to death and choking New York City on the ash, but we do know that the Pope is unlikely to be factoring in the benefits to straight cis women’s sex lives that accrue when all of us, regardless of gender, are treated as whole, complex people who deserve healthy bodies and happy lives.

[Atlantic]

In 1885, seeking a way to depict vocal sounds visually, Welsh singer Megan Watts Hughes invented the eidophone, a chamber capped with an elastic membrane that would resonate when the singer sang into a tube. When she spread the disk with a thin layer of sand or glycerine, standing waves would register as visible patterns resembling forget-me-nots, daisies, marigolds, chrysanthemums, and sunflowers.

“Stepping out of doors,” she wrote, “[I] have seen their parallels living in the flowers, ferns, and trees around me; and … the hope has come to me that these humble experiments may afford some suggestions in regard to nature’s production of her own beautiful forms.”

The field of study she helped to pioneer is now known as cymatics — see Chladni Figures.

prismatic-bell:

naamahdarling:

atreefullofstars:

theunnamedstranger:

jumpingjacktrash:

xenoqueer:

nettlepatchwork:

pervocracy:

Note to vacationing non-Americans: while it’s true that America doesn’t always have the best food culture, the food in our restaurants is really not representative of what most of us eat at home.  The portions at Cheesecake Factory or IHOP are meant to be indulgent, not just “what Americans are used to.”

If you eat at a regular American household, during a regular meal where they’re not going out of their way to impress guests, you probably will not be served twelve pounds of chocolate-covered cream cheese.  Please bear this in mind before writing yet another “omg I can’t believe American food” post.

Also, most American restaurant portions are 100% intended as two meals’ worth of food. Some of my older Irish relatives still struggle with the idea that it’s not just not rude to eat half your meal and take the rest home, it’s expected. (Apparently this is somewhat of an American custom.)

Until you’re hitting the “fancy restaurant” tier (the kind of place you go for a celebration or an anniversary date), a dinner out should generally also be lunch for the next day. Leftovers are very much the norm.

From the little time I’ve spent in Canada, this seems to be the case up there as well.

the portions in family restaurants (as opposed to haute cuisine types) are designed so that no one goes away hungry.

volume IS very much a part of the american hospitality tradition, and Nobody Leaves Hungry is important. but you have to recognize that it’s not how we cook for ourselves, it’s how we welcome guests and strengthen community ties.

so in order to give you a celebratory experience and make you feel welcomed, family restaurants make the portions big enough that even if you’re a teenage boy celebrating a hard win on the basketball court, you’re still going to be comfortably full when you leave.

of course, that means that for your average person with a sit-down job, who ate a decent lunch that day, it’s twice as much as they want or more. that’s ok. as mentioned above, taking home leftovers is absolutely encouraged. that, too, is part of american hospitality tradition; it’s meant to invoke fond memories of grandma loading you down with covered dishes so you can have hearty celebration food all week. pot luck church basement get-togethers where the whole town makes sure everybody has enough. that sort of thing. it’s about sharing. it’s about celebrating Plenty.

it’s not about pigging out until you get huge. treating it that way is pretty disrespectful of our culture. and you know, contrary to what the world thinks, we do have one.

Reblogging because I honestly never thought about it but yeah, this lines up.

This is also why the idea of “pay a lot for fancy food on tiny plates” pisses so many Americans off. Unless you are rich enough not to care about throwing your money away, it’s not just a ridiculous ripoff in terms of not filling you up, it’s stingy. Restaurants are places of hospitality. If I pay that much for a plate it had better be damn good and it had better be generous. Otherwise they are just trying to fleece me out of my money AND saying they don’t value me as a customer.

If I go to IHOP or Olive Garden or whatnot, I absolutely don’t need to eat again until evening if I had leftovers, and until the next day if I did eat everything (you can’t really take pancakes home as leftovers).

But EVEN IF I DID EAT EVERYTHING and then ate a full meal on top of that, later, it’s really not anyone’s place to criticize what other people eat. It just isn’t. Let it go. It’s old.

Making fun of American food culture and food habits isn’t original or surprising or witty or funny or getting one over on us or crafting a clever retort or whatever. It’s lazy and petty and childish.

Yeah, we eat a lot of hamburgers. They’re fucking delicious. Cope.

Also re: Nobody Goes Away Hungry, here is AN INCOMPLETE LIST of things my family was gifted by neighbors when I was a child:

—Nina won a writing contest and xir name was in the newspaper, have a cake

—Nina won a writing contest and xir name was in the newspaper, have some cookies

—Nina won a writing contest and xir name was in the newspaper, have a box of licorice (as you can tell this was Very Big News in my neighborhood)

—it’s Christmas, have cookies

—my garden did really well this year, have zucchini and tomatoes and corn also do you like rhubarb

—we saw an ambulance at your house this morning, have a lasagna

—we heard your mother died, have some soup and a bag of groceries

—Nina looked hungry and nobody is mentioning you’re on food stamps because we’re polite, also we just so happened to cook way too much for dinner, have some chicken

—it’s a block party, everyone take home whatever you want…no, more than that….MORE than that! You think we want to eat all this potato salad by ourselves?!

—we heard your husband had heart surgery, here’s a prepped meal so you can eat properly when you get home from the hospital

—it’s Halloween in a small town, have some apples/popcorn balls/pumpkin bread

—I’m a coupon queen and at the end of this shopping trip the store owed me $10 PLEASE tell me you want groceries I have 42 cans of baked beans

—because why not

I am genuinely bothered by how much this tradition seems to be going by the wayside. This was a whole thing when I was a kid, and there’s literally etiquette for how you handle it:

1) hot meals for tragedy and postpartum assistance, sweets for celebration and introduction.

2) presentation is important—don’t present a burnt or dirty dish. Dishes should have a lid or foil on top. Cling wrap isn’t rude, but it should be avoided because it’s easier to accidentally tear and if it’s not wrapped just right it’ll come undone, which is particularly problematic if you’re leaving food at a doorstep where ants may be present. (1990s addendum: when I was a kid you could buy colored or printed cling wrap around Christmas, and it was considered classy to use this on sweets you were gifting your neighbors as long as it was done in person and wasn’t a doorstep dropoff. This, sadly, seems to have gone away, and I miss it a lot.)

3) when receiving food, always say thank you. Never reject a dish; if it’s food you don’t like, someone in your extended family will take it. If four other people in the neighborhood have already gifted you food and you have no idea what to do with it all, freeze some or gift it to people in your out-of-the-neighborhood circle. The only polite rejections are dietary restrictions, and “three other people have already given me zucchini I’m so sorry.” If all else fails, take it to the break room at work. Someone who forgot their lunch will thank you.

4) Never return a dirty dish.

5) Never return an EMPTY dish. It’s always good to have two or three quick, low-effort recipes in your back pocket for refilling a dish. There is no rule for what you should use as a thank-you recipe, but most people use sweets because there are a lot of quick and simple options and you can refill the dish without cooking in it. (My go-tos are fudge no-bake cookies and honey milk balls. A lot of people in my neighborhood did cookie bars.)

5a) …unless you’re a new parent or the dish was presented to you as a consolation for a funeral. In these cases, a thank-you card will suffice.

6) a dish should always be returned within seven days.

7) using disposable dishes is acceptable, but consider the occasion. A new parent will be grateful for one less dish to wash. Someone who just lost a parent should not be presented with a paper plate.

8) if using disposable dishes, make sure you indicate you don’t expect them back. Some people (I am one of them) will absolutely look at disposable-but-reusable dishes, wash them out, and return them if you do not do this. Never give a disposable dish with the expectation it will return home.

9) if giving a pass-me-on plate/Amish friendship plate, be sure the recipient knows the rules of a pass-me-on plate. You can purchase plates with the rules printed directly on them, but if you’re using a regular plate, gift it with a card that explains the game.

THIS WAS A WHOLE THING. You’ll notice #9 up there—pass-me-on plates are usually somewhere in size between a dinner plate and a serving plate, often very pretty, and the way they work is you fill them up with something good to eat and give them to a friend. The friend will then wash the plate, fill it with something good, and pass it on to someone else—hence the name pass-me-on plate. (The phrase “Amish friendship plate” is….older. With all the slightly wincey connotations of “older” when discussing out-groups.)

This was a way families bonded with other families and cared for our communities, and I really want to see it come back.